The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society received a $500,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation last month to support a two-year research project on the current state and prospects of the humanities.
Launched in 2012, the Neubauer Collegium aims to “deepen knowledge about the world and our place in it” through collaborations with professors from nearly four dozen departments across the University in nearly 150 projects.
The project supported by the grant, titled “The Future of the Humanities,” is set to begin immediately. It will work to define core principles and qualities of work in the humanities and collaborate with NORC, a quantitative survey and data institute at UChicago. The project will culminate in a report with recommendations for administrators, instructors, and institutions involved in the humanities.
This research comes as the University’s Division of the Arts & Humanities faces a major restructuring amid significant budget cuts across the University. This past summer, the division announced it had been considering consolidating its 15 departments into eight under the guidance of several faculty working groups. No formal plans have been published yet.
The grant is intended to “respond to mounting pressures facing the humanities, from assaults on academic freedom to the erasure of vital histories,” the MacArthur Foundation wrote in a press release on January 20. It is part of a larger $10 million in funds distributed to various organizations across the country, such as the Feminist Press and the forthcoming National Juneteenth Museum. The Neubauer Collegium is the only higher education-affiliated institution among the grantees.
“I’m deeply gratified we will have an opportunity to convene such a critical conversation at the Neubauer Collegium, and I am hopeful about our ability to imagine forward-thinking ideas for the future of the humanities,” said Neubauer Collegium Roman Family Director Tara Zahra in a January 20 press release.
Matthew G. Andersson, '96, Booth MBA / Feb 25, 2026 at 5:02 pm
Grants themselves create the inherent Humanities problem. As a higher education practice the humanities have been insulated by dominant single-channel finance–government and institutional sources–which does two things. It biases the humanities endeavor with obligatory institutional ideology, and it underwrites consensus research thematics to pass grant decision criteria. Those combined effects put the humanities into narrow financial flows, and hence why humanities funding can be largely curtailed or diminished by political criteria alone. One could make the same argument for science, but its utility is more readily monetized commercially. There is no true arms-length humanities finance marketplace, and therefore no actual realm of diversified thought or operational fitness under financial discipline. That is also why Yale faculty, like their peers at Chicago, Columbia, Harvard and other platforms, have aligned their political donation almost exclusively to DNC collection (98 percent at Yale), acting as a tax on grant favor, and further increasing reliance on such sources. The MacArthur Foundation will otherwise have no impact except to reinforce status quo behavior. Universities will generally maintain such status until they are financially exhausted, which is also why such grants are counterproductive as they dampen or remove incentives for alternative funding, except by random donor largess. Former UChicago president Zimmer spent a similar amount on a curriculum and department “overhaul” study which is still sitting on a shelf; apparently its expected utility. See the Financial Times, May 19, 2019, “Overhaul Likely to Mean Business as Usual at the University of Chicago.” Otherwise the ‘future of the humanities’ cannot be discerned at the Collegium, except as a defensive artifact for institutional continuity. The absence of endowment growth by the current administration, otherwise exacerbates federal grant finance dependence, and Humanities economic vulnerability.